Foundation VP oversees overhaul

Russ Howes did such a good job as the chair of the National Committee on Planned Giving (NCPG) that he put the organization out of business. But that’s a good thing. Really.

Howes, vice president for legal affairs and planned giving at the UW Foundation, helped the NCPG evolve after 20 years of existence into a new entity, the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning.

“In 1988, planned giving was one of the fastest-growing professions in the United States,” Howes says. “The general rule was, pretty soon every charity in the United States would have someone on their staffs who did nothing but planned giving.”

The members included people handling planned giving or major gifts while working directly for charities and nonprofits, which made up about 70 percent of the organization. Also part of the membership were attorneys, certified public accountants, trust officers and those in the insurance industry who dealt with trusts, wills and other such vehicles.

“We started to realize about four or five years ago that really wasn’t the way that the profession was developing,” Howes says. “What happened was that planned giving was part of the job, and people also did something else.”

That “something else” most commonly was major gift activity, but there are a variety of hybrid positions, he says.

That shift in actual real-world duties — and a drop in membership from close to 12,000 in the mid-‘80s to about 6,700 — led the committee’s leadership to reconsider its mission.

That process resulted in the new Partnership for Philanthropic Planning (http://www.pppnet.org), which launched on Jan. 1.